George
Hallett
was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1942. His early inspiration to become
a photographer came from the movies he saw at the Friday night film show
at the primary school in the fishing village of Hout Bay. On the way home,
as friends enacted scenes from the films, Hallett would be thinking about
the camera angles, composition and dramatic lighting that impressed him
in the films. At the age of 20 he began a correspondence course in photography
with the City and Guilds of London. He free-lanced for the famous South
African magazine Drum but the politics of segregation made it virtually
impossible to find other work. Hallett therefore decided to leave for Europe
in 1970. Before his departure, the author James Matthews persuaded him to
photograph District Six: an area in Cape Town about to be bulldozed 'by
those mad social engineers of apartheid'. Hallett subsequently donated the
work to the District Six Museum.

Hallett
moved to London where he made contact with South African exiles like Alex
la Guma, Pallo Jordan, and Dudu Pukwana. He free-lanced for The Times Newspapers
and designed book covers for Heinemann Educational Books for over 12 years.
During this period he had his first exhibition in Amsterdam under the auspices
of the World Council of Churches.

In
1974 he moved to France where he worked as a freelance photographer, designer
and farmer. Over the next ten years Hallett lived and worked in Zimbabwe,
Amsterdam and Paris, and taught at the University of Illinois, USA. He began
working back in South Africa in 1990 and in 1994 was commissioned by the
ANC to photograph the movement's coming to power. A series of photographs
of Nelson Mandela taken during the elections that year won him a Golden
Eye Award from the World press Photo in Amsterdam. Hallett returned to live
in Cape Town, South Africa in 1995. George Hallett's photographs have been
exhibited in and collected by museums and galleries in America, Norway,
Germany, Amsterdam, Paris, Sweden and his native South Africa.

George Hallett began his career as a street photographer in Cape Town.
In 1970, he left apartheid South Africa and moved to London, continuing
to document the lives of ordinary people, including the Afro-Caribbean
community in Birmingham, UK